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Officer of Swan Lake Park discusses installation

Nancy Levine, Swan Lake Renaissance Officer, discusses the recent installation of solar-powered outdoor lights near Woodstock NY.

We started Swan Lake Renaissance in 2004. And across the street from the park there is another project that we did by the waterfall and then we did the park the following year. The park was a success. Everybody uses it, it’s beautiful.  People would go there at night but it wasn’t lit. It wasn’t welcoming at night and there was a safety factor also.  We have a boardwalk along the lake and we have a gazebo near the lake and the only light we had was along the road – the light post along the road. So that was it.

So now that it’s lit… It’s a beautiful light and it’s very soft, it’s not glaring at all and it lights up the major parts of.. The boardwalk is all lit up – they go down the boardwalk and then by the parking lot. So it lights up the places in the park that need to be lit up and it also left out a dark part so that there is one secluded part.

Oh, it’s gorgeous, it really is!

When I saw the lights at the display I didn’t like them at all, and I think it was probably because of the setting they were in. They were in a building, they just looked humongous and they didn’t look appealing. But then I saw them up at Bethel and they did look very nice It’s not something you would think would fit in nicely, but they do and they enhance the park rather than detract from it.

I would say we have 10 times more people at night than there were before. The first two summers we didn’t have the lights. So basically after dusk there weren’t too many people there. There’d be a couple of people sitting in the gazebo or something but not people sitting at the tables or walking around there.

We have a boardwalk. It’s very close to the lake and we didn’t want to put up a railing because people sit on the edge of the boardwalk and they fish from there, and it just wasn’t something we wanted to do. It’s fine during the day but at night it was an issue. So the lights going along the boardwalk alleviated that problem.

And also just lighting up the rest of the park so that people feel safer being there. And also had kids that destroyed a few things – whether intentionally or unintentionally. With the lights here I think we’ve had less incidences of vandalism.

When we did the park, there was no consideration of the lights because at that time we knew nothing about it. But when the lights were proposed to us, Tommy and Mark LaGattuta of E & T Landscaping said yes, go ahead and do it. And he met with the engineer. He donated everything that you would see at the park except for the furniture and the gazebo

And so we started with flowers in hanging baskets and then we did a landscaping project with the waterfall – I think it’s even prettier than the park. It’s on a smaller scale but it’s magnificent.

So we did that and we won first prize with the Renaissance for that project and so we won $10,000 so we took that and invested it in the park.